Luca Durán - Libertas (2021)

Luca Durán follows a series of stellar EPs with his first solo album, released via his own Akoya Circles imprint. The uncategorizable Swiss-Colombian producer embarks on a wide-ranging electronic journey throughout ‘Libertas’, a diverse sonic exploration of the concepts of freedom and independence, two hallmarks of his already diverse studio work.

This debut album comes from a period of creative metamorphosis, during which Duran’s musical output evolved from the dextrous house, techno & electro of earlier releases under his original production moniker Look Like. Beginning with the Circunvalar EP in summer 2019, when Duran began releasing solely under his own name, his style has now grown beyond the traditional dancefloor genres of electronic music to encompass influences from post-punk and IDM. This has carried through all his recent work, including the recent EP for TraTraTrax, the sub-label of Colombia’s Insurgentes collective, on which Duran explicitly reconnected with the iconography of his family’s homeland.

The genesis of ‘Libertas’ began in late 2019, when during a family visit, his native Colombia erupted into a series of protests against police brutality, inequality and corruption.Having spent most of that trip under curfew, Durán returned home to Amsterdam and his studio at the ‘Volkshotel’ complex, ready to shape his debut album. The conversations amid the crisis remained fresh on his mind, many carrying over into the creative community around whom he is surrounded.

Seeking to sonically explore and reflect on concepts of liberty and autonomy, Durán, like all of us, was soon faced with a lockdown of a very different kind. The result is ‘Libertas’, an album written and produced across 2020 and under equally extraordinary, world-changing circumstances. Throughout, Durán mixes the abstract with the purely musical, creating his own interpretation of magical realism, somewhere between the echoes of club culture and the influence of Latin American writers such as Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez.

From it’s bold opening moments, ‘Libertas’ sees Durán establish a confident passage between the physical and the cerebral, blending bold, unpredictable studio experiments with melody and emotion. On ‘Missed Dinner’, human communication caught in waveforms is spun into musical drama. ‘Telenova’ pays tribute to another Latin cultural institution with a touching and resplendent melody. Amid ambient intermissions, ‘Moondust’ emerges as neoclassical bliss, somewhere between driving and dissolving, even while remaining entirely beat-less.

Durán saves the album’s most potent energy for its title track, ‘Libertas’, high in tempo and rich in optimism, it’s vocal sample inferring, “We all have feelings like this sometime... But we’ll have to talk more about these feelings, and what causes them.” The mood introverts further for the searching textures of ‘Sad Marquis' and the album’s delicate finale, ‘Piano Diva’, demonstrating the vulnerability at the heart of Durán’s music, as well as his undeniable technical nous.

Engrossing, imaginative and political in the tradition of electronic music’s innovators, ‘Libertas’ mixes Latin philosophy and futurist techniques in order to create something distinct, future-facing and never less than thoughtful.

- John Thorp